Quick-Blog Site Tumblr Takes Off In An Uncertain Marketplace

Lauren Kasman is no stranger to blogging. Over the last eight years, she's been typing away in her room and jotting down her thoughts for friends to read. When she moved to Washington, D.C., for college, she wanted to connect with others outside of her social circle.

"I felt like no one was listening. And with a blog the whole point is to have someone on the other end," she says. "Otherwise, you know, it's like placing a phone call to no one."

Kasman's frustration grew. She couldn't quite figure out how to connect with others. Then, her friends told her about Tumblr.

She created an account on Tumblr, or what's called a tumblog, in this case. Within a day, she had 10 followers — people who have linked to her blog and are reading what she writes.

Users can post text, images, videos, audio, quotes from a story or famous person, and links to other websites by clicking clearly visible buttons on the top of the main screen.

In January, the four-year-old site had more than seven million individual blogs. In the last six months, the number has nearly tripled. Tumblr now has about the same number of bloggers as Wordpress, a blogging site that's been around for eight years.

Mark Coatney, who works at Tumblr, equates using Tumblr to a daily activity many of us all know pretty well.

"So it's more almost like, you know, an e-mail experience in a way, right?" he says. "You'll dash off an e-mail or do a tweet or something like that because it's quick and easy, so it's kinda taking that to thinking and applying it to blogging."

"It kind of speaks to what I think is a new and emerging thing in journalism, which is kind of talking to your audience on a peer-to-peer level," Coatney says. "You know, as opposed to the broadcast model where you put it out and people consume it."

More Personal

Meanwhile, Kasman is using the dashboard — a scroll of every post by everyone you've chosen to follow — to quickly pick out what's worth reading, watching and listening to. On the top right corner of each post there are a few symbols. Each one allows users to interact with the Tumblr community.

If Kasman likes a post and wants to save it for future reference, she can do it by clicking the heart button. If she wants to add her two cents to a conversation she can do that, too.

She can directly reply to a post. Or she can do what's called a reblog, which re-posts the entry on her page.

"You start to feel almost like rewarded for telling people your stories, and I think that's one of the things that allows you to get a bit more personal," Kasman says.

Tumblr tries to differentiate itself from competitors by acting as an offline, or real world, connector. The company organizes social gatherings at coffee shops and restaurants.

But it's not the only company trying to offer easy-to-use blogging that makes it easy to connect with other people and their blogs. It has smaller competitors named Posterous, Soup and Jaiku.

But what's the reality of people having time for Tumblr in addition to updating their Facebook page and posting on Twitter?

"I think that we're learning that we're going to have to limit the number of communities where we can honestly invest a bit of ourselves in," says Brian Solis, who works for Altimeter group.

Analysts say at the moment, among all the competitors, Tumblr is the easiest to use. But in a fast-changing tech world, it's not easy to predict which companies will last.

John Asante is an editorial assistant for NPR's Talk of the Nation. He has beenbloggingon Tumblr for nearly two years. During that time, the site has helped him make new friends across the county and even meet his current girlfriend.